I have just been introduced to my grandmother in Liverpool Town Hall. Or at least, to a side of her that I never knew. She looks beautiful, clothed in a loose white robe, personifying peace and industry on one wall of the vestibule, education and progress on another. As a teenager, before she met

Keeping mum” was what the wartime generation did. It was a matter of survival. But after 60 years Ruth Ive decided it was time to talk about her highly secretive work in the Second World War. Now nearly 90, she has just written her first book detailing her job monitoring Britain’s only wartime

ON MONDAY, January 4, 1999, Lieutenant Colonel Philip Holmes came home for lunch to discover his beautiful wife dead, hanging in the hallway. Yet one week later at her funeral, searching for words to express his grief, Holmes found himself promising to rekindle her light. “I wanted to explain to

I THINK I am brave. Yes, I do. I’m prepared to accept that now,” says Hilda Bernstein, the veteran anti-apartheid campaigner, reflecting on the time her husband faced the death penalty three years after her own prison detention. “I’m not boasting that I’m extraordinary in any way. I think you

ARRANGING to meet Vanessa Hall-Smith, the new director of the British Institute in Florence, revolves around a yoga class timetable. Hall-Smith, 52, is a Renaissance woman and ashtanga yoga is the latest diversion on which she expends her considerable energy. She is already a lawyer, linguist, keen

HOW DO YOU say goodbye to a sick husband who may die while you are gone? Or, if he survives, will be so severely damaged mentally and physically that he can never look after himself, but you will be in another country, banned from returning to him. Do the words exist? That is the situation that